A right to exist: Australia’s first Queer Arab Film Festival launches
A new film festival in Sydney explores the intersection of race, religion and spirituality.
20 Aug 2014 12:00
Sahar Amer
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Television
A still from Sally El Hosaini’s feature film, My Brother the Devil (2012), screening at the Queer Arab Film Festival.
In a 2007 speech at Columbia University, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, famously proclaimed that there were no homosexuals in Iran. Despite the controversy that his words sparked, many Arabs and Muslims would still probably agree with Ahmadinejad’s assertion that homosexuality is a Western phenomenon and that the association of the words “Arab” and “queer” is an oxymoron.
Sahar Amer is the organizer of the Queer Arab Film Festival, and a Professor and Chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on Arab diasporas, on gender and sexuality in Arab and Muslim societies, and on postcolonial identities. Sahar's third book entitled What Is Veiling? will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in September 2014. She has also published Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), which was awarded the 2009 Aldo & Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies by the Modern Languages Association of America. In addition, she published Esope au féminin: Marie de France et la politique de l’interculturalité [A Feminine Esope: Marie de France and the Politics of Interculturality] (Rodopi, 1999) and has co-edited two volumes about Franco-Arab encounters (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and New Francographies), one special issue of Yale French Studies, as well as one art catalogue. Sahar has received several national awards, including a National Humanities Center Fellowship and a Fulbright.
